Digital image editing and digital image editors are common in today's digital photography technology. In digital editing, photographs are typically taken with a digital camera and input directly into a computer for storage and manipulation. Additionally, traditional printed photograph may be digitized using a scanner and also stored and manipulated on a computer. Images can also be stored and obtained from stock photography databases. With the advent of computers, graphics tablets, and digital cameras, the term image editing encompasses everything that can be done to an image in a darkroom or on a computer. Image editing is most commonly subtle (e.g., alterations to coloring, contrast, so forth), but may be explicit also (e.g., overlaying a head onto a different body, changing a sign's text). Image editing software can be used to apply effects and warp an image in whatever way possible until the desired result is achieved. Image editing software can also be used to create images from scratch for example with tools for drawing or adding text. Sometimes, after image editing, the resulting image has little or no resemblance to the image from which it started.
Digital image editing computer programs are prevalent and easily accessible and provide a means that allows any computer to be used for digital image editing. Often times, a standalone software package may be purchased and installed on a personal computer or in a computer networking environment. These conventional software programs allow for digital images to be manipulated and saved at the local machine in which the image editing software is running. Thus, a user of personal computer with such image editing software may easily manipulate any number of digital images that are also stored at that computer. In this scenario, the task-intensive steps of actual image manipulation are accomplished by the personal computer.
Further, various networking environments may allow image editing software to be run at some accessible server computer such that images are manipulated at the server computer at the behest of the connected client computer. In this scenario, the task intensive steps of actual image manipulation are accomplished by the server computer that hosts the image editing software and the client computer merely acts as a controller.
With the advent of web sites and server farms capable of storing a tremendous amount of data, various computer users have begun storing digital images in online storage services. In this manner, a person may access stored digital images from any computer that the person may be using. With universal access to stored digital images, one may upload images from virtually anywhere and store the digital images in an online manner. However, well-known and comprehensive image editing software may only be resident on one personal computer or within a specific network of computers. Thus, even if a person is able to upload and store their newly created digital images from any computer connected to the internet, the person cannot access their image editing software to manipulate the newly created and stored digital images.